


forgotten by design

by iamsolarflare



Series: just an ordinary foot soldier [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, i don't know if it's graphic or not?, i read a fic and got into a slate mood and then this happened, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-20 04:33:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11913285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamsolarflare/pseuds/iamsolarflare
Summary: A board meeting goes well; everything else does not.





	forgotten by design

**Author's Note:**

> WOW OK YEAH TWO SLATE FICS IN A ROW TODAY HECK YEAH
> 
> y'all know shit's going down when almost the entirety of team talon is in the tags amirite
> 
> let me know if there's any grammar mistakes or w/e because i typed this up in maybe two hours

Another board meeting. 

These were easily the worst parts of Akande’s days in Talon. The group’s goals were admirable - as terrorists, they’re the villains who will forge a brighter world - but the meetings are insufferable. Too much talking, and not enough action.

Today, they’d been meeting to discuss the mysterious disappearances of two of their higher-ups; the number surprises Akande. One of them he knows the whereabouts of - Vialli, who he personally saw to disposing of. The man is either deep in the river or knows enough to never let his face be seen again.

The other one, though - one man who used to go by Darrus, when he was alive. Found with his neck cleanly cut open; all his important files had gone missing as well. The guards were killed with their own weapons, none left alive.

No forced doors. No sign of struggle from the outside of the building.

It could only have been an inside job.

It would be easy to suspect Sombra, of course, but the woman had shown that she much rather preferred her targets alive, for blackmail purposes. And anyway, there hadn’t been a single sign of her signature gun being in use.

Darrus had been on Akande’s side. His death was a problem.

It was little wonder, then, that he barely paid attention to the foot soldiers standing outside the doors to the Talon board room until one of them spoke up.

He was a plain-looking man in the standard uniform - the dark circles under his eyes and the way his hair fell over one eye were the only deviations from uniform.

“S-sir?” he asked, voice trembling. Akande turned towards him, raising a single eyebrow.

“Yes?”

“I, er. Worked for Darrus. He was a good boss.” The man looked away nervously, biting his lip, clearly trying to think of the next words to say.

“Mm,” Akande responded, passing him by as he walked into the room. This was a waste of his time. He was going to avenge Darrus either way - no foot soldier’s opinion would have swayed him. 

“Heyyyy, Doomy,” came a drawl from a corner of the room. Sombra.

“You brought the hacker,” he noted, taking his seat across the table from Reyes.

“ _ She has pertinent information, _ ” Reaper responded. “ _ And unfortunately, she insisted she be the one to show it. _ ”

Board members filed into the room, one by one, until most of the chairs were full and the doors shut.

To business.

* * *

 

“Man, he didn’t even  _ listen _ to me,” complains the one guard, idly fiddling with the standard Talon gloves on his hands.

“Doomfist doesn’t give a shit about us foot soldiers, man,” the other guard responded. “I know you’re a transfer from Darrus, but he was an exception to the rule of Talon not giving a shit about the lives of the little guys.”

“Yeah, no kidding.” He took a bandana out of his pocket - a blueish-grey color - and tied it around his face, then pulled his hair back so it fell neatly instead.

“Do I look like I could fit in with one of the head honchos?” he asked, pulling down the bandana and grinning at his fellow guard.

The other man just laughed. “Nah, buddy, you’re too plain.”

“Well. Good to hear, then.”

There was a soft  _ pop _ , and he felt a blooming pain in his chest - he looked down, made to yell, but found he couldn’t even open his mouth.

The other guard stood straighter, pulling the bandana back up over his mouth and calmly striding over to him, expertly lifting the man’s gun out of its holster.

The friendly glint in his eyes was completely gone - nothing but cold, hard gold.

“Really should’ve used those vacation days while you had the chance,” he said, voice an even monotone, and then pressed his gun - which had an odd cylindrical outfit to it, one that definitely wasn’t standard - to the man’s forehead.

Another soft  _ pop _ .

* * *

 

Board room was soundproofed - couldn’t have the top people’s secrets spilled to the guards outside the doors, no matter how thoroughly those guards had been vetted beforehand.

He detached the silencer from his gun, tossing it across the room, and fitted it to the dead man’s weapon instead. No use in wasting a round - and the man had never fired, so it was full.

He pulled out a pocket knife - the oldest thing he owned, and the only thing he always owned - and gingerly cut a couple of wires from the keypad. Talon board meetings were always long, but it’d help to have a little extra time while they figured out how to manually unlock the doors. Comms had been cut to the room already - he’d done that beforehand, on his way here.

His first stop was the security room - right next to the board room, not even in view of a camera. Talon really wasn’t the best when it came to making sure that blind spots in the building were covered, but it wouldn’t have been a problem if so - the cameras were already feeding six-second loops of the guards standing outside the boardroom, relatively unmoving.

He twirled the pocket knife, barely looking at it, and slid it across the man’s neck with a flick of his wrist, then cleaned it with another flick on the man’s shirt.

Cameras off. He locked the door behind him, then turned out to the hallway and broke into a slow run, down to the tech center.

Not a lot of guards at first, easily taken care of with a couple of well-placed shots or neck snaps. His eyes moved left to right rapidly as he ran, taking in the rooms as though he were speed-reading a page.

Then, a whole cluster. He ducked low, firing at the man almost ready to draw on him, then casually tossed another man into the way of a shot from the side. This building was low-staffed, and hardly anyone knew him anyway, but it didn’t hurt to be careful; another  _ pop _ , and the remaining survivor had a clean hole in his chest.

He felt a pain behind his eyes as he entered the computer room, and gritted his teeth as he crossed over to a terminal.

He’d memorized the lines of code ages ago; they’d drilled it into him before he even started working for Darrus. All it took was a couple of clicks and he was able to sit back, eyes scanning the data scrolling across the screen as the worm did its work.

Now, the nasty part.

He stood up, cracked his neck, and spun the pocket knife around his hand again, then turned towards the stairs. Two more floors of guards.

It wasn’t exactly protocol, but he let a soft grin creep across his face anyway as he headed to the next room.

* * *

 

The door lock malfunctioning had been the first sign that something was off. The higher-ups had joked about it, but Sombra knew a problem when she saw one. And this was a problem.

The second they were out the door, her suspicions were confirmed - a single look at the dead man on the ground in front of them was all it took for the board members to devolve into arguing.

Not Sombra. She turned to Doomfist and Reaper, snapping her fingers.

“I  _ told _ you things were gonna get bad, no? Anything important held in this facility?”

“ _ The data center, _ ” Reaper hissed, clenching a gloved fist before taking off in that direction.

Akande looked down at the foot soldier dead on the ground, then towards the opposite side of the door where nothing but a discarded gun lay.

“The soldier that spoke to me. He did this.”

Sombra blinked.

If it had been a foot soldier - and she didn’t doubt Doomfist’s intuition, he was often right - it meant something.

She dashed off in another direction, towards where the shifts were posted on a wall in the guard quarters.

The smell of blood was stronger here, and it didn’t take long to see why - a remarkable number of dead soldiers were lying about the room. Barely any signs of struggle; this was a professional assassin, all right.

She crossed over to the bulletin board, scanning it for the name of the second guard at the door, and hissed in annoyance.

A neat strip of paper had been torn out of where the second guard’s name should have been. There was nothing there.

The printer! She turned towards it, grinning. It’d have a record of what was printed. She’d have that man’s name, or at least his alias.

She tapped the printer, getting ready to siphon off its data, and it whirred to life, as did her screens.

“Got you now, little - huh?”

The record of the papers printed only had one guard on-shift at the boardroom. Nobody else.

“Shiiit,” she hissed, then turned and sprinted towards the computer rooms as quickly as she could.

* * *

 

“ _ Nothing’s there, Sombra _ ,” Reaper said, reaching under his mask to rub his temples as she went through the same fileset for the tenth time.

“Shut  _ up _ , Gabe!” she hissed at him, glaring and slapping his hand away as he reached out to turn off the monitors.

It was too late at night to be doing this. They’d cleaned out the bodies ages ago, he’d already inspected them and confirmed that the style didn’t match any of Talon’s known enemies. 

Reyes needed sleep, and Sombra wasn’t letting him get it.

“Doomy saw him,” she said, turning towards the third man in the room, who had his arms crossed and was staring at the data with similar intensity. “It  _ was _ that second man, I didn’t imagine it.”

She tossed a file to Reaper, who slapped it aside - nothing interesting in there anyway, she’d made him check it no less than three times - and walked over to Akande, staring him in the eyes.

“What,  _ exactly _ , did he say to you,” she said, waving a hand and pulling up what looked like some sort of audio recorder on her purple screens.

He furrowed his brow and said nothing for a while, his face contorted as if someone had punched him in the gut.

“He said that Darrus had been a good boss. I thought he was going to ask me something about avenging him, so I ignored him.”

_ “Fuck! _ ” Sombra hissed, flicking a hand and pulling up another set of purple screens. Reyes leaned forward, looking over them as Sombra turned back to the computers.

“This is the same person who killed Darrus,” she muttered. “Same signs. Data totally wiped, no record of the guy. How hard is it to find info on  _ one foot soldier _ ?”

No record of him ever having worked there...

Reyes shot upright all of a sudden, remembering an evening several years ago. He’d come back to a side outpost of Blackwatch, found the place completely trashed - the few soldiers on duty killed, no record of the only missing person ever having existed. Key data sets missing.

He’d never told anyone about it, not even the other Blackwatch members and certainly not Morrison. Nobody needed to know, and the info had never leaked.

He turned to face Sombra.

“ _ This has happened before. I’ve seen their work _ .”

“Who  _ is _ it?” she snapped, eyes wide.

“ _ I don’t know. I never saw their face, just the aftermath _ .”

She turned towards Akande again.

“Why don’t you remember  _ anything _ about that guy? You’re the guy who recalls  _ all _ his enemies, for fuck’s sake!”

“He wasn’t memorable to me at the time,” he said, staring at Sombra’s screens with a blank, distant glare. “I thought he was just another foot soldier.”

**Author's Note:**

> sombra's fucking pissed
> 
> real talk i can't imagine that akande is happy with this scenario either. how's he gonna remember his new enemy if said person intentionally was as forgettable as possible. slate's whole ability to be forgotten really easily doesn't fit well with akande's worldview
> 
> i almost had slate leave sombra a note on the bulletin board but i decided that'd be way too dramatic, and slate's mostly about business. no time to curate a nemesis when he has other companies to fuck up
> 
> honestly this fic kinda implies that slate is older than i picture him as? what with him having been around in the blackwatch days. to be fair i don't even know if slate knows how old he is. it's whatever


End file.
